Sunday, September 4, 2011

This Week in the Book Reviews

This week's reviews have me thinking about book titles. Is it best to invite the reader in with a clever quote ("This Is Not the Ivy League"), or give it to them straight ("Potato")? At what point does the intriguing title risk mis-shelving in the YA fantasy section ("The Triumph of the Dark")? Ponder this and read on:

[Kennedy]
argues with considerable force that the candidate deliberately set out
to blacken himself in the public mind — while taking care not to go too
far — and would have lost the election had he not done so. He sees
Obama’s courtship of black voters not as tertiary, but as the main event
and as the perfect vantage from which to view the campaign and the
presidency.

Like many recent history Ph.D.s, I spent my early weeks as a graduate student soaking up Richard J. Evans's In Defense of History (1999), so I enjoy reading his evaluations of historical scholarship. This week in the New Republic, he reviewsThe Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933-1939 (Oxford University Press), by Zara Steiner. In his estimation, the book is well researched, well argued, and "brilliantly written, full of pungent judgments, arresting phrases and sarcastic asides."

In the past months, we've mentioned several reviews of Richard White's Railroaded. This week in the Nation, Robin Einhorntakes a turn. Here's a taste:

While White tells many horrifying and entertaining stories about corruption and incompetence, his overarching argument is primarily about the fundamental characteristics of capitalism and modernity. For White, “modernity” has nothing to do with bureaucratic rationality and efficiency. Rather, in the transcontinentals he sees a blundering form of corporate capital that reorganized everyone’s lives “but did so unevenly and chaotically" . . . . Modernity was “a world dominated by large, inept, but powerful failures whose influence could not be avoided,” and it remains “as much a product of disaster as of success; both can bring the new into being.”